(Practical experiences from the winter of war year 1940/41and
their precise verification.)

By G. Peter[sic] and W. Rasch

German Society for Pest Control

The poison that the Nazis finally settled upon for the murder by gas
of Europe's Jews was hydrogen cyanide, also known as hydrocyanic acid or
Prussic acid, chemical symbol HCN. One of the reasons this deadly gas
was chosen was its ready availability, by the ton, in a stable,
transportable, and reliable form: it was the principal ingredient of the
trademarked poison Zyklon-B.

Some consider it to be more than mere coincidence - they may be
right or wrong - but it is one of history's bitter ironies that this
same poison was originally developed and marketed as an insecticide.
After nine years of denigrating the Jews as insects, vermin, parasites
on the body of the Aryan Reich, these symbols became reality. The same
poison used for Schädlingsbekämpfung - the "war on
vermin" - was now the final weapon in the war against the Jews.

In this technical paper, written in 1941, two researchers from the
company that produced Zyklon describe its properties when used (to kill
insects) in the cold of winter. This was one of the issues facing the
Nazis, their army in particular, as they fought the war. In most
military endeavors, fighting disease has always been as important as
fighting the enemy, and so the killing of typhus-bearing insects was an
important field of study.

It appears there is a typographical mistake in the first author's
name; it is Dr. Gerhard Peters, not "Peter." He is also the author of
Blausäure zur
Schädlingsbekämpfung,
a lengthier work from 1933 which is available, though we have yet to
transcribe and translate it.